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Your guide to what the 2024 American elections mean for Washington and the world
The writer is the author of the next book ‘Hayek’s bastards: Neoliberal roots of populist law’
For years, right -wing populist parties have used forms of direct democracy to pursue their goals. From referendums that stop minarets in Switzerland in Brexit’s vote, the idea was to circulate creation short and directly into the popular will. In the United States, Maga is now experimenting with something different: direct economy.
Similar to the plebiscite and referendums, the direct economy seeks to make an end to experts and tasks and to communicate directly with individual citizens and voters. It strives to demostify those that are naturalized times captured in stock market indices, interest rates and even FIAT currency, to expose these as simple elites tools in further suppressing real people.
We can see direct economies in action in three different ways. The first is the centralization of executive power in US President Donald Trump’s tariff policy. The arbitrariness of his tariff announcements is taken as a demerit by many. However, from the point of view of the direct economy, it is this arbitrariness that is their strength.
When European traders have to wait until Trump wakes up to know what the flow of markets will be for the day, this is not a sign of weakness for him, but of power. This shows that the abstract ideas of treating the “most favored nation” or multilateral union of sovereignty were always shadows on the face of American all -power and the ability of the president to relocate actions to a global level.
A second form of direct economy is the transfer of cash, which were distributed by Trump during the pandemicism. The prominent signature at the front of the stimulus controls that landed in the American mailboxes was a sign that the benefit of the state should not flow through the supposedly corroded tubes of the social security or medical administration, let alone the indirect security of human health and services or the education department. This was a public good as a private account clash.
Trump Megadonor and diligent Maga Convert Elon Musk has captured this approach to his efforts to influence elections, giving $ 1 million in size to people who support his special candidate. Recently, Musk gave two such checks in Wisconsin in a choice that his favorite candidate eventually lost. It seems angry that this tactic came for nothing, he later posted that the corruption of the judiciary was “the long concept of the left”. One might wonder if a version of the direct economy, where a vote doubles as a lottery ticket can be seen as a form of corruption itself.
The third form of the direct economy is more esoteric. It rotates around the bright metal of gold. Since the confiscation of private gold by Franklin D Roosevelt in the 1930s and the illegal of the retention of private gold by individuals until the 1970s, a small subdivision of economic thinkers has cultivated a belief that the US government seeks to maintain gold. They say goals are to prevent people from being able to take care of themselves after the inevitable monetary collapse brought about by the expenses of well -being and efforts for what they think as social engineering.
One subplot of this is that the gold held by the US government is not really there. Mediation of value through paper money is seen as the greatest fraud ever played in humanity and the one who will inevitably reach an ugly conclusion. Since the 1980s, the main Goldbug in the US, former Texas Republican Senator Ron Paul, has called for a gold audit at Fort Knox, even presenting legislation for this purpose in 2011.
Musk has chosen this idea and called on Paul himself to be part of his so -called government efficiency department. “Who is confirming that gold was not stolen from Fort Knox? Maybe it’s there, maybe it’s not,” Musk posted in February. There is now a discussion of a gold audit, supported by Paul’s son, Senator Rand Paul.
In fact there is a precedent for this approach. In 2012, a precious metal consultant and former workman of Booz Allen from Munich launched a similar campaign that chose momentum in Germany, culminating in the transfer of a large amount of golden bars from the Bundesbank and their public appearance. “We’re doing this to tell the citizens that gold rods are here,” a member of the Bundesbank Board told journalists. The precious metal consultant was Peter Boehringer, who has now represented the Alternative for Germany (AFD) in the Bundestag for two election cycles.
The direct economy is a strong attack on existing institutions and people standing between citizens and their leaders. Whether his tactics, fraud and whims can exceed their shocked effects on conventional markets is something that the weeks and months will show. So far, the interest rate on US Treasury bills is slipping down, and consumer confidence is also falling. The gambling of the direct economy is that none of this will matter.
